Ocular Migraine

[faceless]

twice in the last couple of days I've had this recurrence of a thing I used to get when I was a teenager. Back then it used to come with a lot of pain also, but these two instances have been painless, though not exactly pleasant to sit through.

My eyes had a very similar effect to the second picture in the webpage and I was pleased to find that as I was going to mock something up in photoshop. It's good to know also that there's not much wrong, or that serious, though having 2 in a few days is very strange so I'll ask the doctor about it anyway.

I know you get migraines eefan, are they like this?

[alan1254]

Too much time on the computer!

[faceless]

who me? haha

[eefanincan]

[faceless]

that first link was perfect, cheers!

but I must say - for a site that deals with eye problems they could learn a bit about colour contrasts in their web design.

[faceless]

well, I saw the doctor today and she gave me some tablets called sumatriptan which are supposed to be brilliant.

Gawd bless the NHS!

[eefanincan]

They are supposed to be very good. I'm in the small percentage of people who they do nothing for. There is a limit on how many you can take in a day/week, so be sure to follow the directions really carefully. I'm assuming she said they were actually Ocular migraines, then?

BTW, you sure got into the dr. really fast! It's rare that it would happen that quickly here.... most people end up going to a walk in clinic or hospital. I'm sure it was nice not to have to wait for answers.

[faceless]

I actually had an appointment for something else so I managed to ask the doc about this too. It was a new doctor that I'd not had before and she was really good. Turned out she suffered from the same thing so it was easy to explain.

[SpursFan1902]

I used to get migrains when I was a kid. They started at about age 9 and I stopped getting them in my mid 20's....It normally started with some bright flash of light or sometimes very rich food. THen I would get a blurry spot in the middle of my vision that would slowly move out of view. At that point I knew that I had about 30 mins to get myself to bed before the pain was too much to bear. I normally talked myself into falling asleep and when I woke, the headache was gone, although my brain would feel bruised for a day or so. For a couple of years after I stopped getting the headaches, I would still get the blurry spot and now I don't even get that. One joy of getting older, I guess....

[eefanincan]

It's good to hear that you outgrew your migraines, spurs..... but at least you knew how to cope with them when you did get them. You hit the nail on the head by describing how they started and you knew you had 30 min to get to bed. That's the key.... learning the warning signs (which are as individual as the person getting them!). For me it's the nausea, some it's the vision, etc.

BTW, Face..... how are your's doing? Have you had to take any of the new med's yet? They can really make you exhausted so be warned.... I tried them once and I slept for an entire 8 hrs.

[faceless]

I've not had any since those two the other week, so I've not had to take any more of the pills. I could do with a good sleep tonight though... haha

[pirtybirdy]

Do you actually sleep Face? LOL!! It seems you are always here, even when you are not. LOL!

[faceless]

Migraine Gives Woman Foreign Accent
April 20, 2010
Tim Hewage,
Sky News Online

A woman from Devon has begun speaking with a Chinese accent after suffering severe migraines. Thirty-five-year-old Sarah Colwill puts the startling change down to an extremely rare medical condition known as Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).

"I knew I sounded different but I didn't know how much and people said I sounded a bit Chinese. Then I had another attack and when the ambulance crew arrived they said I definitely sounded Chinese."

The rare disorder is thought to be caused by strokes and brain injuries and causes sufferers to lose the ability to talk in their native accent. There have been an estimated 60 recorded cases of FAS since it was first identified in the 1940s.

Mrs Colwill, who lives in St Budeaux in Plymouth, Devon, with her husband Patrick said her accent change had been startling. "I spoke to my stepdaughter on the phone from hospital and she didn't recognise who I was. She said I sounded Chinese. Since then I have had my friends hanging up on me because they think I'm a hoax caller. I am frustrated to sound like this. I just want my own voice back, but I don't know if I will get it back."

After researching FAS on the internet Mrs Colwill has been in contact with doctors from Oxford University who are interested in studying her plight. She is undergoing speech therapy to try to revert to her West Country accent.

John Coleman, a professor of phonetics at Oxford University, said: "FAS is extremely diverse, almost certainly not 'one thing', not a well-defined medical phenomenon. It is not the kind of problem that there are any easy generalisations about."

Sufferers can develop an accent without ever having been exposed to it as it is the change in speech patterns from a brain injury which causes the lengthening of syllables, change in pitch or mispronunciation of sounds. Experts believe FAS is triggered following a stroke or head injury, when tiny areas of the left side of the brain linked with language, pitch and speech patterns are damaged. The result is often a drawing out or clipping of the vowels that mimic the accent of a particular country, even though the sufferer may have had limited exposure to that accent.

One of the first reported cases was in 1941 when a Norwegian woman developed a German accent after being hit by bomb shrapnel during an air raid. As a result, she was shunned by her community, who falsely believed she was a German spy. In 2006 Linda Walker, 60, woke from a stroke to find that her Geordie accent had been transformed into a Jamaican one.

-------------------

[luke]

that story made the paper down here, but it was good to hear her accent now no great loss though, the janner accent as they call it isn't so great ...